On Wednesday, Fox News invited anti-gay hate group president Tony Perkins to discuss newly
released guidelines for the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, which includes a policy allowing transgender
detainees in immigration detention to continue hormone therapy if they had
begun treatment before being taken into custody.

Perkins railed against the new rule, which he referred to
as “cross-dressing as healthcare,” and condemned the measure as an unnecessary
waste of taxpayer dollars:

For that reason, a number of courts have already begun recognizing the
rights of transgender inmates to continue undergoing hormone therapy while
incarcerated. Last August, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that
denying hormone treatment to transgender prisoners amounted to “torture”
and thus violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Many transgender individuals being held by ICE are detained while fleeing persecution in their home
countries or after being denied asylum in the U.S. Before the release of the
new guidelines, these detainees would be trapped in a “legal black hole,” facing inconsistent treatment options
and frequently being subjected to the whims of potentially anti-trans ICE
officials.

Moreover, the lack of standardized ICE policy concerning
hormone treatment puts both transgender detainees and ICE’s legal interests at risk. As Dana O’Day-Senior wrote in
Hastings Law Journal:

Without these policies in place,
transgender detainees will continue to suffer uncertainty, medical neglect,
unequal or arbitrary access to treatment, disparate treatment from
detention facility to detention facility, and the detrimental
and potentially life-endangering results of untreated GID.

Not only will transgender
detainees suffer, but ICE will continue to leave themselves open
to costly and potentially embarrassing Eighth Amendment claims of cruel
and unusual punishment, such as they continue to face for
various other types of healthcare denials. [emphasis added]

The policy isn’t unprecedented, either. As Fox’s Megyn
Kelly pointed out, transgender inmates in federal prison who received treatment
prior to being incarcerated have been able to continue undergoing hormone
therapy since 2005. Last October, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons
adopted new guidelines that would allow transgender inmates who hadn’t begun
treatment before incarceration to obtain hormone therapy as well. At
least eight states also maintain explicit policies providing
hormone therapy to transgender prisoners.

Perkins’s attempt to depict ICE’s new policy for transgender
detainees as radical or extreme is inaccurate, but – considering hishistory of
attacking efforts to protect transgender people – it’s what you’d expect from
the media
sweetheart.